Recent content in All Posts on gvalia.xyz
As of today, March 30, 2026, gvalia.xyz has turned 2. It’s another
major milestone to my little corner to the internet and I’m proud to
have made celebrating it a tradition. 
 During the last year, I’ve written a lot, but published little. This
is expected to continue for a little while. The great thing is that
owning a website does not have to come with the…
Throughout 2025 I kept seeing CEOs of large companies (including AI
labs) scaring people by mentioning the possibility that white-collar
jobs would be automated by AI. Jobs, representing a source of
livelihood and meaning for a lot of people, were directly threatened.
As a result, a lot of discussion happened online and offline. While
people were feeling all sorts of things…
In this post I’ll try my best to explain an idea that has been brewing
in my head as a result of maintaining my own Emacs configuration. I
don’t want to go through the effort to implement the idea, so I’m
sharing it here in hopes that it inspires someone. 
 The big idea 
 Imagine this: your Emacs instance is a blank slate and you’re forced
to use…
In praise of creating crap is an article by Annie Mueller that
deconstructs what being creative is. This article acts like a dose of
powerful antidote for me. It illuminates all the heavy ideas that I’ve
apparently been carrying around for a while. It has to do with “being
creative”. That phrase is mired with expectations. It is one of those
sets of words that…

 

 As of today, March 30, 2025, gvalia.xyz has turned 1 year old. During
this one year, I’ve written 13 posts across two languages, 5 chirps ,
and 3 wiki pages . The design so far has remained more or less
steady, with minor tweaks here and there to improve the stylistic
consistency. 
 Running this website has been an interesting experience. I’ve…
I’ve long been thinking about the differences between a tweet/toot and
a blog post. It’s taken me a while but I think I’ve finally got it.
From my view, a blog post is much more fully-formed: it makes a clear
and obvious point (or tells a fully formed story). A tweet/toot, on
the other hand, is meant to be written quickly, without refining it
again and again.…
I’ve long been fascinated by how inefficient our default keyboard
layouts are. Much has been written about QWERTY and its impacts on
English, but in other languages the situation is worse from my
experience. It seems that there are “free” benefits we can get by
switching to anything other than QWERTY, though speed is not one of
these benefits. According to…
I use a plain markdown file as my “inbox”. All ideas, links, raw
thoughts and, sometimes, bits of chaos go there to be processed
later. As great as this system is, there is a danger of endless
accumulation. Some ideas can be a bit too precious to let go. 
 I caught myself being greedy tonight. I scrolled up and down the file
and saw the sheer size of it. Then I…
There was a time when I was very into the idea of saving and archiving
everything. Then, years passed and one day I realized that I didn’t
even once look at anything I had saved. I saved all this data just for
the sake of saving it. 
 The data hoarder community is smart enough to call this behavior what
is is — hoarding. But not saving anything means that what…
I’ve often thought that the years of watching YouTube in adolescence
have held me back from becoming a better person than I am now. I’ve
now been convinced that this is a false notion. If it weren’t for
YouTube, I would not have grasped the inner workings of the English
language until much later. Knowing English and having access to
English resources has ended…
There are a lot of systems that are deliberately designed to be small
and limited in scope. uxn comes to mind. When I open up potato ,
which can be described as a desktop environment for the system, I get
surprised by both how usable it is and how lacking it feels compared
to the way I am used to work. 
 
			 Figure 1: browsing the uxn source code with potato…
I use evil-mode in Emacs, which means that I get the text-editing
capabilities of Vim and the benefits of Emacs and its ecosystem. In my
use I’ve noticed that Vim keybindings occupy all of alphanumeric keys.
Of all these keybindings, some remain essentially unused either due to
the obscurity of the functionality behind it or, simply, because they
are underutilized. Here I…